Innere Sicherheit / The state I am in

For the main exhibitions of this year’s photoszene festival in Cologne, artist-curators Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber have put together 18 different photographic positions in regard to various aspects of “security”. (photos: Wolfgang Sonnemann, Maxi Uellendahl)
On the one hand, the artists pose political questions concerning statebased “internal security”, concerning surveillance, censorship, historiography, protest or terrorism and what role photography plays in these. On the other hand however, and equally as important, there are the artistic positions too, which deal with personal, individual “states we are in” – with issues concerning gender, the handling of artificial intelligence, spaces of retreat from society, but also concerning the question of to what extent we deal with private images in public. Only joint confrontation with the supposedly private and visibly political delivers information on the kind of society we want to live in. photoszene.de»»Including works by: Jochem Hendricks, Max Regenberg, Beate Geissler/Oliver Sann, Ryudai Takano, Günter Karl Bose, Marc Thümmler, Huang Xiang, Jason Lazarus, Simon Menner, Jan Dirk van der Burg, Luisa Whitton, Petra Stavast, Francesco Jodice, Daniel Josefsohn, Allan Gretzki, Stephen Gill and Astrid Proll.

BöhmKobayashi

Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber cover an extensive range of personas: photographers and artists, curators and exhibition organizers, designers and art book editors. Yet as they move through their photographic cosmos, it is not always so easy to determine where one identity ends and the other begins. Regardless, in their works and activities as artists and art facilitators they have long since become moderators of a very specific photographic culture. (Florian Ebner, 2011)